The Treasury Department is expanding its calls for overhauling regulation of the financial services sector, this time focusing on changes to the most significant rules surrounding securitization and derivatives.

Canada's big banks are pursuing wholesale banking, capital markets and select M&A opportunities across the border to hedge against a slowing mortgage market and other economic concerns on the home front.

The trend of putting ever-smaller pieces of the same commercial mortgages into multiple securitizations requires investors to be extra careful, and will inevitably make workouts of bad loans more complicated.